Three weeks of beaches and diving

Sunday, July 6, Lipah Beach, Bali (edited and pictures added in October, 2015)

It’s been a good three weeks since I last posted on my blog, and that has not been due to a lack of travels about which to blog.  Instead, I have barely seen an internet connection worthy of the name, and haven’t had access to a computer until I got back here a few days ago.

When last I wrote, I was in Dili, East Timor.  Some of my faithful readers (take a bow, Hans Westbroek) thought that there was too much existential angst/burnout/mid-life crisis in the last post.  I’m glad to report that three weeks of beaches, diving and relaxation have put me in a much more positive (and, for me, more usual) frame of mind.  I am about as relaxed and happy state of mind as I have been for the past 10 months.

Michael and Pyae Pyae

When I left Dili, on June 13th, I flew to Bali to meet Terri.  I had hours to wait until her flight arrived (she was in New Zealand, visiting her family), so I arranged to meet up with a former colleague from my Yangon days, Michael, who has just finished 4 years of working at the Bali International School.  It was great to see him and his Burmese wife Pyae Pyae again, and to meet his young son Kevin for the first time. He is off to work in Shenzhen, China; international school teaching is so itinerant that I always seem to be meeting former colleagues in new and exotic locales.

The view from Terri's place in Lipah.

When Terri arrived, we took a taxi up to her place here in Lipah Beach, in the Amed area in the northeast corner of Bali.  She bought her house here four years ago, and has visited it numerous times, but this was the first time for me to visit it.  I was a bit skeptical of how much I would like the area (I have not been the biggest fan of Bali in the past), but it has proved to be an amazing location.  This corner of the island is a bit of a backwater, off the main road and not disfigured by huge hotels and masses of foreigners.  It’s a dryer bit of the island, and not suited for rice growing, so it’s not what we think of as typically Balinese (stepped rice terraces glinting green in the sunshine).  The tallest mountain on the island, Mount Agung, towers malevolently over this area (its last eruption, in 1963, killed over a thousand people), although it’s usually shrouded in clouds by mid-morning.  The coastline is a series of tiny horseshoe bays of black volcanic sand with steep hills rising behind.  The beaches are covered in the small outrigger sailboats, jukungs, so typical of Bali, with their colourful sails furled along their bamboo spars.

Terri’s house sits up a hill maybe 25 vertical metres above the ocean, but so close that I can hear the roar of the incoming surf and hear the local boys playing soccer on the beach.  There are a number of smaller hotels scattered along the road, but much of the village consists of Balinese villagers’ houses, many of them in the process of being improved with the proceeds of working in tourism.  Every morning a small armada of fishermen set out in their jukungs to fish with hand-held longlines for tuna, barracuda and mahi-mahi.  It’s tourist season now, and there is a steady increase in the number of white faces on the beach and in the shops and restaurants, but it’s far from being the crazed frenzy of Kuta Beach.  Instead this area seems to cater to a quieter crowd, including a number of long-term Bali residents who have built houses straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest on the headlands between the bays.  The water is warm and good for swimming, and parts of the bay have coral in excellent condition.

Colourful sailboat off Lipah Beach

An added attraction is that about 20 kilometres up the coast is the diving mecca of Tulamben, where one of the most famous shipwreck dive sites in the world, the USAT Liberty, is located.  On our second day here, Terri and I went diving there, exploring parts of the huge WWII transport ship that was torpedoed by the Japanese in 1942.  It’s a very intricate dive area, full of holds and holes and rusted-out floors to explore for both big and small sea life.  It was our first dive in over a year, since our Maldives trip, and so it was a little bit of a readjustment, but great fun.  I would like to go back and do some more exploration someday.

Relaxing over breakfast on the terrace at Lipah

Mostly, though, for the three days we were in Lipah we swam, ran, walked into the hills to visit Terri’s teak trees and the village houses of the family with whom she works here in Lipah, and ate well.  The views from the terrace looking out over the bay, where I am sitting now in the late afternoon light typing this blog, are spectacular and lend themselves to lots of lazing about with a Kindle, or sipping a nocturnal whiskey before bed while watching the stars dance over the ocean.

Terri, teak tree owner

Terri with her housekeeper Luh, Luh's husband and son

On Tuesday the 17th of June we finally tore ourselves away from this paradisiacal existence and headed back along the three-hour drive to the airport.  We caught a flight to Makassar, the main city on the island of Sulawesi, and then another turboprop flight to Luwuk, an island on the eastern peninsula of this starfish-shaped island.  We got in at sunset and decided to make one long day of it and hired a minivan to drive us seven excruciating, bone-crunching hours to Ampana, the ferry terminus for the Togean Islands.  It was a hellacious experience, with our driver living out his Paris-Dakar fantasies as he squealed tires around curves, slalomed between huge potholes and hammered over frequent gravel sections, accompanied by a horrible soundtrack of Indonesian techno music that got louder as time wore on.  We got to Ampana at 1:30 in the morning and fell into bed instantly.

Kadidiri's pier

The horrorshow on the road did save us a full day of travel, though, as we caught a ferry at 10 am the next morning to take us to the Togeans, an almost mythical backpacker favourite that had been on my to-visit list for the past 18 years, since my first visit to Indonesia.  By 2 pm we were disembarking in Wakai, the unappealing main city of the archipelago, and hopping on a speedboat to take us to Kadidiri Island, our home for the next five days.  We checked into the Kadidiri Paradise and settled in for some fun, relaxation and diving.

Terri on the pier at Kadidiri

Paradise has a great location, looking out over the Gulf of Tomini, surrounded by extensive coral reefs and good diving sites, and blessed with spectacular sunsets seen from the long pier.  We did some good diving there over three days, first in the immediate vicinity (lovely coral walls but distressingly little big fish life and no turtles), then around the nearby volcanic island of Una Una (much better, with a big school of barracuda, although still no turtles, sharks or mantas), and then the highlight, the wreck of a B-24 bomber from World War Two that made an emergency landing on the sea back in 1945.  It was a spectacular dive, with the aluminum of the plane not rusting and allowing all the features of the plane to be easily spotted.  The machine guns on the upper turret looked almost ready to fire, while the instrumentation in the cockpit was still intact.  Even the propeller on one of the four huge engines was still in place, as were the huge vertical tabs on the enormous tail.  Lots of fish life, lots of history and atmosphere.  On the way back we stopped and did a muck dive, looking for interesting critters, and saw robust ghost pipefish, a baby frogfish, a mantis shrimp, a snake eel and a plethora of nudibranchs.

Knobbed hornbill

On land, I was happy to see lots of interesting tropical birds, including a pair of knobbed hornbills who put on a great morning display for Terri on her birthday, and lots of colourful lorikeets.  The snorkeling was excellent, and our sunset viewing was second-to-none.

Kadidiri sunset

Although the dive shop was well run by Emmi, an irrepressible Finnish dive instructor, the same could not be said for the hotel, which lacked a manager on-site, was woefully understaffed and ran a bit like Fawlty Towers. The restaurant, in particular, was pretty mediocre.  After we had finished our days of diving, Terri and I decided to head to another island, Fadhila, to have a change of scene.  We chartered a boat and on the way we stopped off to snorkel with stingless jellyfish in a small salt-water lake.  I had done something similar in Palau back in 2007, and really enjoyed the spooky experience of being surrounded by literally thousands of pulsing orange jellyfish.  Terri was less taken, however, and was convinced that her subsequent ear infection was thanks  to the murky, stagnant water of the jellyfish lake.

Heading off from Kadidiri to Fadhila

Fadhila

Fadhila was a breath of fresh air, literally, after the windless, mouldy sweatbox of Kadidiri Paradise.  Set on a breezy peninsula, the rooms were clean, cool and perfect for sleeping, with hammocks for reading in the constant sea breeze.  The snorkeling was great, and there was an outrigger canoe that we could borrow to paddle around the island, flying over the extensive coral gardens that fringed the island.  The food was excellent, and there were interesting fellow guests to talk with at dinner.

Terri swimming at Fadhila

The excellence of the hotel, however, was offset for us by the incredibly painful ear infection that afflicted Terri right from our arrival on the island.  By the end of our four days, she was crying with pain and her ear, along with the entire side of her face, was a swollen, red, angry mass.  She was in such pain that we worried that her eardrum might rupture.  She lived on a steady stream of painkillers and somehow managed to hold on until we could get to the city of Gorontalo on a night ferry and get to a hospital.  The hospital was a positive experience, as it was efficiently run, incredibly inexpensive (about 11 US dollars for a consultation with an ear, nose and throat specialist and three different sets of pills).  The pills took almost immediate effect, and Terri was reassured that as it was an infection of the outer ear, neither flying nor diving should have any adverse effects.

Relieved both physically and psychologically, we flew off the next day, Saturday, June 28th, for our next diving destination, the Derawan Archipelago.  We caught three successive Lion Air flights (back to Makassar, over to Balikpapan and then a turboprop to tiny Berau), although my backpack didn’t make the last flight and we had to wait for its arrival while feasting on an excellent lunch in Berau.  Then came a two-hour drive past a monstrous coal mine (the reason for the existence of the airport), lots of slash-and-burn agriculture and plenty of palm oil plantations, before a boat ride took us out to Derawan Island and the Derawan Dive Lodge, our home for the next four nights.

I had first heard of the diving in this area back in 2005 when I was doing a divemaster course on Bunaken Island, north Sulawesi.  Some of the customers of the dive shop had dived on Sangalaki a few months before and had raved about the turtles and manta rays.  I had kept it in mind over the years, and when Terri and I decided to travel through Indonesia this summer, I looked into diving.  Sangalaki’s one resort closed some years ago, but dive operations on Derawan and on Maratua islands still visit it regularly.

Looking pretty happy with the diving!!

The three days of diving we had while staying at DDL were some of the best of my entire diving career.  Amazingly Terri’s ear was back to normal by the time we got to Derawan We started with a day on Kakaban island, drifting along amazing vertical coral walls in search of pygmy seahorses, of which we saw two, tiny creatures a few millimetres long hidden in huge gorgonian sea fans.  We also managed to see a black-tip shark and a large leopard shark resting on the bottom, along with a couple of turtles.  Between dives we also visited another jellyfish lake (Terri lasted a few minutes, but then retreated to the ocean to snorkel).

The second day the diving only got better at Maratua Island, with tons of turtles, a couple of big eagle rays and an incredible blizzard of barracuda hanging out in the crazy currents of a channel that drained Maratua Lagoon.  It was Terri’s most exhilarating dive ever, flying at the end of a tether attached to a reef hook, surrounded by huge masses of barracuda.

Coming home from our manta encounter

It was all just a prelude to the third day, when we finally dived legendary Sangalaki.  The day started perfectly as I saw no fewer than 13 big turtles from the bow of the boat as we passed over seagrass beds near Derawan.  The day was all about manta rays, and when after two dives we had only seen one, I was a bit downcast.  While we were eating lunch on the boat, though, Terri spotted fins breaking the surface not far away, and we realized that mantas were circling right at the surface of the water.  The dive that followed was absolutely incredible, with us sitting on the sandy bottom and watching as massive manta rays flew past and over us in all directions.  At times it was impossible to know where to look, as there were mantas coming in from three different directions.  At least six individuals (and probably several more) made between 30 and 40 passes, leaving us utterly awestruck.  Even at the end of the dive, as we hung on reefhooks in a channel doing a safety stop, a manta ray appeared beside me, hung motionless in the current for a while and then suddenly vanished as another manta flashed aggressively past him.  We came up grinning from ear to ear, completely blown away by the experience.  Finally, to cap it off, we encountered a big school of dolphins as we motored back to Derawan.

I was utterly impressed by the marine life on display around Derawan.  Even though it’s expensive to get to, expensive to dive and expensive to stay, I think Derawan was worth every penny.  I have never seen so many big, old green turtles in one place as I did just off the beach of the dive lodge.  The mantas and barracuda were incredible, and the general diversity and quantity of big fish was impressive.  I would rate it up there with Sipadan, Palau, the Maldives, Bunaken and Lembeh Strait as one of the premier dive sites in all of Asia (and hence the world).

Sean and I reunited again in Lipah

Then, sadly, it was time to tear ourselves away, backtrack to Bali and spend another four idyllic days here in Lipah, two of them in the company of my friend and fellow nomad Sean.  Indonesia is the sixth country in which we have crossed paths over the years (France, Switzerland, Japan, Egypt and the UK being the others) and as always it was great to bounce ideas off his hyperactive mind.  He arrived here expecting a small shack in a teak forest and was utterly seduced by the beach, the views and the house.

Wandering the rice fields around Ubud

And now it’s time to end this narrative, go find dinner and pack for a couple of days in Ubud before I head east, far east, to the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.  Life is good, and travel is having its usual therapeutic effects on my until-recently-overstressed mind.

Ubud Jazz Cafe

Peace and Tailwinds

Graydon

Seminyak Beach and its pounding surf

PS  (October 2015) Terri and I did go to Ubud, where we spent a very relaxing day wandering the rice fields outside town, and a great evening listening to jazz in the Jazz Cafe.  The next day Terri flew back to Switzerland, and I spent a day in the mass-tourism ugliness of Seminyak (redeemed only by its pretty surf-pounded beach) before flying off to the Solomon Islands.  I've added a couple of pictures from Ubud and Seminyak.

Dili Detox

 

 

Dili, East Timor, June 12, 2014

Sporting my new $5 Dili haircut at Cristo Rei

 

It's a pleasant tropical evening here in the courtyard of East Timor Backpackers, a slightly down-at-heel hostel here in the capital of one of the world's most recent countries, only gaining its independence in 2002 after a quarter century of blood-soaked warfare.

 

I have been here for about 48 hours, and tomorrow after lunch I will fly back to Bali.  I had hoped and planned to see more of this tiny country, but a combination of sloth on my part and high prices/inconvenience on the part of East Timor has reduced me to having done very little so far.  I am going to blame it all on the idea of the Great Year-end Detox.

 

The Cristo Rei statue just east of Dili

 

There are those people who take a chunk of time periodically and starve themselves for a week, drinking cranberry juice and letting their intestines purge themselves of accumulated toxins.  Others, such as a bartender with whom I worked in London a quarter century ago, stop drinking alcohol every other month to avoid developing a dependency on the stuff.  Celebrities addicted to a variety of intoxicants check into Betty Ford to purge their systems.

 

Dili town seen from Cristo Rei
 

 

I feel as though teaching has a similar deleterious effect on my well-being and requires a similar mental and physical purge.  There are those people who feel that my existence, teaching in the Swiss Alps, skiing and cycling and playing tennis throughout the ski year, and then travelling during my ludicrously lengthy summer vacations, is some sort of perfect dream existence.  To a certain extent this is true; every morning when I wake up and gaze out on the morning light glinting on the Dents du Midi, and every afternoon that I spend schussing down the slopes of Leysin, I am acutely aware of how fortunate I am.  However, as the years slide by in some sort of existential merry-go-round, the day-to-day grind of teaching starts to wear on my soul.  Things that I can stand for a few months or a year start to drain my soul dry as the laps of the sun start to pile up.  It's definitely a first-world sort of problem, but I find myself starting to have a longer and longer psychological hangover every June as the school year stutters to a close. 

 

This year was definitely the hardest year I've had since my dismal 4 months in Cairo in 2004.  As those of you who either follow me on Facebook or read my year-end letter know, I had a nervous breakdown in early November, was completely out of action for a couple of months, and then worked only 60% for the rest of the school year.  It was miserable, and despite my reduced school load, I was absolutely exhausted and mentally fried again by the end of the year.  I sank so low as to have a few sessions with a well-meaning psychiatrist.  We never really hit it off, but he did say something that stuck with me.  I said that I felt as though I had been poisoned by work, and that it was a bit like someone who has a horrible night drinking tequila and who won't touch the stuff again afterwards.  He said that he understood the analogy, but not to forget that it wasn't so much the tequila as the sheer volume consumed in a short amount of town that poisoned the body.  This is a good way of visualizing working in a boarding school:  far too much work that, taken in moderation, might not be harmful, but which, taken in excess for years and years, leaves you feeling like Keith Richards circa 1976.

 

So what I'm doing here in East Timor, I realize, is a psychological cleanse.  I sleep prodigiously, wake up, go for a run along the seafront, do some yoga, have breakfast around 1 pm, go for a bike ride, read for a few hours to cleanse my mind of the nonsense of teaching mathematics and physics, do some sudokus, juggle a bit, read some more, have supper and go to bed early. 

 

I remember, back in 2003-4 when I was taking that black hole of human effort known as the Ontario Bachelor of Education, being asked to write an essay on the whole experience of teacher's college.  I fired up the computer and wrote a scathing review of the mind-numbing, soul-sapping, time-wasting rubbish that constituted eight months of my life that I would never have back again.  One of the lines that stuck in my mind was something to the effect that "if I wanted to become a better teacher, it would have been a better use of 8 months for me to go be a ski instructor in the Rockies, take a dive instructor course down on Utila, or spend 8 months riding my bicycle from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow; these eight months did nothing but dull my senses, destroy my enthusiasm, rob me of sleep, stultify me and make me a less happy, less creative and less effective teacher."  The sad truth is that the day-to-day grind of trying to teach teenagers, particularly rich ones with outsized senses of their own intellectual gigantism and senses of entitlement the size of their trust funds, is just as abrasive to one's intellectual powers as sitting through the horror-show of my BEd.  This is why I need such a long summer vacation; if I had only 4 weeks off every year, I wouldn't make it through my first year of teaching.

 

The ancient Israelites had the idea of a sabbatical every seven years.  I think we all have an inbuilt sabbatical clock; mine runs about 2 years before I need to get away, not think a single school-related thought, travel, get my body into shape, experience something new and completely unplug from the formal education system.  I am in awe of people like my friend Charlie who has taught every single year for 43 years; I could no more do something like that than I could flap my arms and fly across the ocean.  In retrospect, trying to force myself to teach at one place for 5 years (as it will be at the end of this upcoming school year) was a mistake, an attempt to force myself to do something absolutely antithetical to my well-being, a twentieth shot of employment tequila that left me sprinting for the toilets and has left me (as the Chileans say) "achazado" (with a hatchet in my skull). 

 

I hope that the next 2 months of diving, snorkelling, hiking, reading and birdwatching will repair my mind and body (did I mention that I finished this year with a beer gut, no discernible aerobic capacity and nothing positive other than a pretty decent first serve in tennis?) and let me survive another year of teaching in Leysin?  I will keep everyone posted.

 

 



Sunset over the Timor Sea

 



Summer Cycling in the French Alps

Leysin, Switzerland, August 25, 2013

I started this blog post sitting in the lovely little French town of Guillestre, in the old house being restored by my sister Saakje and her partner Henkka.  Terri and I were there for a few days of vacation before I start work again for an unprecedented 4th consecutive year in one place.  I'm a little surprised myself that I've stayed stationary for so long, but I seem to be having a great time and getting just enough time to travel to keep my wanderlust at bay temporarily.  This is a summary of the bike touring I did this August in France (I finished the big tour on August 15th, then went back down to Guillestre with Terri and came back to Leysin on the 21st; the blog post was finished once I got back to Switzerland.)

So those of you who are faithful readers of my blog know that I love bicycle trips; I've taken at least one long bike trip every year since 2000 except for in 2008 and 2012.  However, this summer, having done my bike trip through Iceland with Terri in June, I decided to try something new in August.  I was in Canada and the US in July, visiting family and friends, but came back to Europe a couple of weeks before school began in order to do a different style of bike trip.  I have always taken camping equipment and ridden with a fully loaded touring bike, allowing me to stop wherever I want, sleep cheaply (or for free) and make the bike trip more of a complete adventure package.  This time, though, I wanted to experience riding the great passes of the Alps, the ones that the Tour de France goes over, travelling as light as possible.  I booked some (not-so-cheap) hotels, got a small back rack trunk to carry a change of clothes, some toiletries, a few spares and a Kindle and set off with my racing bike on the TGV for Avignon on August 6th.  The plan was to spend 9 days cycling back to Switzerland over as many of the great cols as I could.  It was a different sort of travel experience, centred much more on the cycling and less on sightseeing than I am used to.  Here's a summary of what I got up to.

Day 0:  August 6th, Avignon-Carpentras

Distance:                                 36.9 km

Total to Date:                          36.9 km

Final Altitude:                             180 m

Vertical Metres Climbed:            294 m

Time:                                             1:49

Average Speed:                    20.1 km/h

Maximum Speed:                  43.2 km/h

After I got off the TGV in Avignon (man, was it hard to get a booking and a reservation for my bicycle!  It eventually took my sister and two employees of the Swiss railways almost an hour to get it done.). I took a long time and a lot of wrong turns to get out of the city and onto the right road to Carpentras. It was an urban cycling nightmare of one-way streets and misleading signs.  Once I was finally pointed in the right direction, I raced along the road easily, looking up at the white summit of Mont Ventoux all the way to my lodgings above a little restaurant in the pretty old town of Carpentras, a town apparently entirely populated by immigrants from North Africa.  I was awakened repeatedly in the night by thunderstorms of apocalyptic violence.

Day 1:  August 7th, Carpentras-Mont Ventoux (1911 m)-Digne Les Bains

Distance:                                176.5 km

Total to Date:                         213.4 km

Final Altitude:                              615 m

Vertical Metres Climbed:             3312 m

Time:                                            8:59

Average Speed:                      19.7 km/h

Maximum Speed:                    52.8km/h

Happy and tired atop Ventoux!

Of all the iconic climbs of the Tour de France, two loom larger than any others in the public imagination.  One is the climb to Alpe d'Huez, a ski resort near La Grave; I cycled that last October on a weekend jaunt to La Grave with Terri.  The other is the Mont Ventoux, featured regularly in the Tour, including this year when Chris Froome imposed himself on the field with a dominant victory on the climb up the Ventoux.  The mountain is not enormously high (just over 1900 metres in altitude), but since the surrounding countryside is only a couple of hundred metres above sea level, the total altitude gain to the summit is about 1500 metres from Malaucene, one of the three towns from which roads lead right to the barren summit of the highest peak in Provence.

Looking back at the barren summit as I descend the classic route towards Bedoin and Sault

I started the day not knowing whether I would even be able to make the attempt; violent storms the night before were still raging when I woke up, and the proprietor of my hotel was dubious about the wisdom of trying to reach the summit.  Ventoux is named for the violent winds that buffet its upper slopes; last year Terri had the plastic cover blown right off her cycling helmet by gale-force winds near the top of the climb.  I had visions of the same sort of weather hitting me, especially as it was raining on me as I left Carpentras.  By the time I reached Malaucene, however, it was grey but not actually raining, and I set off undeterred.  I rode quickly, trying to race up as quickly as I could.  I passed a few cyclists, but nobody caught up to me until near the end, when a Dutchman about my age came up on me.  We rode together for a while before I had to stop to rest and take a few pictures just as we emerged from the beautiful forested lower slopes onto the barren scree slopes that look like snowcaps when seen from far away.  I took a couple of minutes to myself, then climbed the last few steep kilometres to the summit, emerging into another world right at the top.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of cyclists come up the other way from Bedoin and Sault every day, and I met the horde at the summit.  Somehow I managed to get a picture of me alone with the sign before bundling up into warmer clothes for the descent.  I felt tired and a bit dehydrated, but I was pleased with my time of 1:49 for the 1500 vertical metre climb.  It was the fastest that I would climb until almost the very end of the trip.

Lovely village of Montbrun-les-Bains, just north of Sault

The rest of the day was a long, tiring blur.  I descended at speed towards Bedoin, branching right towards Sault partway down.  I passed the memorial to Tom Simpson, a great British cyclist who died of a heart attack on the Ventoux in 1967, killed by a fatal cocktail of alcohol and amphetamines.  British cyclists leave water bottles, flowers and other mementoes.  I took a photo and kept descending.  In Sault I stopped for disappointing lunch at a restaurant on the main square, and didn't get going until 1:30 pm, with still 100 kilometres to go until my hotel at Digne-les-Bains.  It was a long slog, with a surprising amount of climbing over two smaller passes until I started a long descent that lasted most of 50 km to Digne.  I got in fairly late, around 7:30, with my legs tired and my body crying out for food.  I slept like the dead after a great meal of roast lamb.

Day 2:  August 8th, Digne Les Bains-Col d'Allos (2250 m)-Barcelonette

Distance:                                111.6 km

Total to Date:                         325.0 km

Final Altitude:                            1130 m

Vertical Metres Climbed:             2110 m

Time:                                            5:56

Average Speed:                      18.8 km/h

Maximum Speed:                    58.3 km/h

My second day on the bike was a lot easier than the first, which was good news since I awoke with my legs feeling pretty stiff, tired and leaden after the race up the Ventoux.  Digne intrigued me, since all I knew about the town was that it was the setting of important parts of Les Miserables.  I had forgotten, or perhaps never knew, that one of my favourite Western explorers of Tibet, the redoubtable Frenchwoman Alexandra David-Neel, had lived in Digne and left behind a museum and foundation for religious studies.  I wished that I had time to go poke around the museum. As well, there's an intriguing-looking Valley of the Ammonites, and signs for prehistoric archaeological sites just south of town, all of which I had to leave for another time, if I ever make it back to Digne. I rode out of town after another night of thunderstorms, climbing slightly over two heights of land before joining a river valley that was, as roadside signs proclaimed, part of the route followed by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815 during his Hundred Days, when he escaped from Elba, took over France and was defeated at Waterloo.  I raced along a valley that seemed to be a monument to forgotten industrial towns and railroads until I turned north towards the Col d'Allos.  I spent several hours toiling up the pretty valley, part of the Mercantour region, until I reached a little ski resort and got serious about climbing.  Late in the afternoon I reached the summit of the Col d'Allos (2250 m), took a few pictures, put on lots of layers for the descent and rode down nearly 30 km of steep, narrow roads across a dramatic landscape of gorges and cliffs before ending up in the pretty tourist town of Barcelonette, where I stayed in Le Grand Hotel, a place adorned with old black and white pictures from the glory days of the Tour de France.  I went to bed tired but full of good pizza, and slept the sleep of the exhausted.

Col d'Allos, feeling less fresh than atop the Ventoux

Day 3:  August 9th, Barcelonette-Col de la Cayolle (2326 m)-Col de Valberg (1673 m)-Col de la Couillole (1678 m)-Audon

Distance:                                135.3 km

Total to Date:                         460.3 km

Final Altitude:                            1595 m

Vertical Metres Climbed:             3548 m

Time:                                            8:11

Average Speed:                      16.5 km/h

Maximum Speed:                    55.7 km/h

This was the day that I discovered why professional cyclists dope.  I awoke with my legs absolutely dead, and despite making my way south  again over the incredibly beautiful Col de la Cayolle, my favourite high pass of the trip, in a reasonable 1:57, I was useless for the rest of a long, tough day.  The Cayolle starts with a dramatic gorge, then climbs up an almost deserted valley to the top of a beautiful forested pass.  There's almost no traffic (no trucks, no buses, no campers and only a few cars and motorcycles) and the scenery was suffused with a loveliness enhanced by the first morning of perfect cloudless weather of the trip so far.  It was hard to believe that this pass was a deforested semi-desert 150 years ago before a serious reforestation program rescued it from overgrazing.

The top of the lovely Cayolle

From the top, I rolled south down a beautiful valley (the Var) to the town of Guillaumes, where I turned left and started the second big climb of the day.  This one was only 850 metres in total, but in the heat of the day, on legs that were crying out for EPO, it was a rough climb.  I reached the lovely Col de Valberg and its unlovely ski resort, dropped a few hundred metres to another ski village, Beuil, and then climbed again, very slowly, to the Col de la Couillole before starting a memorable plummet down the red rock gorges (reminiscent of Ladakh) of the Vionene valley to St. Sauveur sur Tinee, past spectacular Roubion perched atop a precipice.  This looks like a classic climbing route, as there's a narrow tunnel and small bridge that keeps the campers, trucks and casual tourists off the road.

The pass that killed me after the Cayolle

Beautiful cliff-top Roubion

At this point, I was physically pretty finished, but I hadn't been able to find accommodation in the valley, I was obliged to turn uphill again and cycle up the Tinee valley for 28 hard-fought kilometres.  An Austrian guy on a bike with a small backpack passed me, and I was fated to keep crossing paths with him for another week.  I made it to the turnoff to Audon, the ski resort where I had found a room for the night, and turned uphill.  It was only 5 kilometres of climbing to Audon, but after 2, I was completely spent.  I stopped, lay beside the road, started again, quit again and generally made an ass of myself until I finally crawled into the ski resort completely dead.  It was the first time in 3 years that I had cracked so totally on a climb.  A beer and a salmon sandwich revived me from the dead, and a subsequent burger and fries completed the rebirth, but I was a sad excuse for a cyclist as I went to bed in my strange little hotel in which I was the only guest.

Day 4:  August 10th, Audon-Cime de la Bonnette (2802 m)-Col de Vars (2109 m)-Guillestre

Distance:                                96.5 km

Total to Date:                         556.8 km

Final Altitude:                            1000 m

Vertical Metres Climbed:             2654 m

Time:                                            6:12

Average Speed:                      15.5 km/h

Maximum Speed:                    59.4 km/h

The little summit loop to the Cime de la Bonnetee (rising diagonally to the left)

This was the day that I realized that I really, truly needed a day off the bike.  I got up early, froze on a frigid descent back to the Tinee valley, had a belated breakfast with the local madmen in front of St. Etienne church, then spent a tough two and a half hours climbing high up over the highest pass so far, the monstrous Col de la Bonnette.  I loved the scenery, with lots of forests and dramatic gorges, but the heavy traffic detracted from the enjoyment, as did my legs, which still seemed to be set on empty.  I reached the top of the col at 2715 metres, then took the steep extra loop that led pointlessly around a little lump on the ridge to make the road reach an altitude of 2802 metres, the highest road in the French Alps (although not in Europe; there are higher roads in Spain and Georgia).  It was a zoo at the top, with campers, motorcycles, cars and bicycles jostling for parking position.

Highest elevation of the trip, on the Cime de la Bonnette

I was glad to snap a photo, put on warmer layers and start the long descent back towards Barcelonette.  I reached the bottom, turned away from Barcelonette and towards the second climb of the day, the Col de Vars.  While I didn't completely crumble as I had the day before on the climb to Audon, I suffered on the steep (10%) grade to the summit, and had to take a long breather a few kilometres from the summit.  I rode much of the last part of the ride with a French guy my age from the Jura who was here on a week's cycling/hiking vacation with his wife.  We had a celebratory beer atop the Col de Vars before I set off through the unpleasant heavy traffic of a French ski resort in the summer.  By the time I reached Guillestre and the shelter of my sister and her boyfriend's house, I had decided to change my plans.  I had originally decided to ride up the second-highest true pass in the French Alps, the Col d'Agnel, the next day, but my slow pace (my average speed had dropped every day since the beginning of the trip) and my real weakness the last two days made me decide to leave the Agnel for later and take a day of slothful indolence instead.

That is one tired-looking cycle tourist!

Trying to revive with some amber nectar on the Col de Vars

Day 5:  August 12th, Guillestre-Col de l'Izoard (2360 m)-Col de Galibier (2642 m)-St. Michel de Maurienne

Distance:                                122.8 km

Total to Date:                         679.6 km

Final Altitude:                              740 m

Vertical Metres Climbed:             3165 m

Time:                                            6:36

Average Speed:                      18.6  km/h

Maximum Speed:                    64.8 km/h

The view down towards Briancon from the top of the Izoard

After a day devoted to eating, napping, playing guitar and then eating some more, I awoke on Monday morning feeling more human and with my legs greatly revived and less heavy.  I got going at a reasonable hour (around 7:30) and set off immediately climbing up the iconic Tour de France setting of the Col d'Izoard.  The road leads through a flattish section of dramatic gorges along the Guil river before turning uphill to climb through pretty scenery towards the steep summit and its stretch of Ventoux-like desert (La Casse Deserte).  I felt strong and set a good pace, not getting passed by anyone until a young racer and a tough old 60-something rode by me a couple of kilometres from the summit.  I was secretly pleased to see the greybeard catch up to, pass and streak away from the youngster near the summit; the youngster looked crushed by this.  At the summit, I relaxed for a few minutes, took a few pictures, put on warmer layers and set off downhill to Briancon.

La Meije, the mountain dominating the view from the Col de Lautaret

Pierre, Daryl and myself looking smug atop the Galibier

Briancon was a nightmare of traffic jams and heat, but once I had escaped I had a fast, pleasant ride up the gentle grades of the Col de Lautaret, the prelude to the famous Galibier.  I kept up a pace of over 20 km/h, which didn't seem that hard at first, but at the top, I definitely felt the lactic acid in my legs.  I had an ice cream, filled up my water bottles and met a couple of fellow Canadian cyclists, Daryl and Pierre, whom I accompanied to the summit.   Daryl was an ex-racer and was quicker than me, but I managed to keep up with Pierre.  Pierre recognized my Butterfield and Robinson bike since his parents used to take holidays with them.  The climb to the summit is absolutely stunning, through wildflower-dotted meadows under reddish cliffs.  It's not too long (8.5 km) or steep (average 7.5%).  It's really from the other side, the long climb over the Col de Telegraphe to the Galibier, that the pass lives up to its fearsome reputation.  I rode partway downhill, had a sandwich and then cruised the rest of the way to the town at the bottom of the Telegraphe, St. Michel de Maurienne.  I was having a celebratory beer by 5 pm, and was asleep by 8:30, happy after a good day in the saddle.

Day 6:  August 13th, St. Michel de Maurienne-Col d'Iseran (2770 m)-Bourg St. Maurice

Distance:                               118.8 km

Total to Date:                         798.4 km

Final Altitude:                             850 m

Vertical Metres Climbed:             2457 m

Time:                                            6:05

Average Speed:                      19.5 km/h

Maximum Speed:                    64.6 km/h

Midride fuel for the Iseran, both physical and mental (reading Proust)

Partway up the final climb to the summit of the Iseran

Although the Iseran is the highest pass in the French Alps, this day was the easiest one of the entire trip in terms of riding.  It took 75 km to get up to the summit, in a series of steep steps followed by long flattish stretches along a river valley that's postcard perfect.  I stopped partway to have a hot chocolate and a pastry, enjoyed the views and, sooner than I had expected, I was at the foot of the steep final wall.  I really enjoyed this part, with dramatic precipices framing oceans of wildflowers, and I arrived at the summit feeling pretty strong.  It was cold and windy at the top, so I didn't linger but raced down the steep road into the sprawling ski resort of Val d'Isere for a beer and a plate of fries.  I made it into Bourg St. Maurice by 5 o'clock and found my hotel, full of gregarious Dutch and German cyclists.  A great meal in an outdoor restaurant and I was asleep by 9, ready for a big ride the next day.

Riotous wildflowers carpeting the slopes of the Iseran

Top of the French Alps (at least by road!)

Day 7:  August 14th, Bourg St. Maurice-Cormet de Roseland (1961 m)-Col des Saisies (1657 m)-Col des Aravis (1486 m)-Col de la Colombiere (1613 m)-Samoens

Distance:                               142.9 km

Total to Date:                         941.3 km

Final Altitude:                              750 m

Vertical Metres Climbed:            3784 m

Time:                                            8:17

Average Speed:                      17.3 km/h

Maximum Speed:                    58.5 km/h

The Aiguille de Glacier seen from the Cormet de Roselend

First pass of the day!

Looking at the elevations of these passes, this day doesn't look that hard; not one of them is over 2000 metres above sea level.  This impression is wrong; it was in fact the hardest day of the entire trip.  Four passes and a final climb into the Samoens valley added up to 3700 vertical metres of climbing and a very tired pair of legs.  The first climb was the highlight of the day, one of the top three passes of the trip (along with the Joux Plane and the Cayolle).  The Roselend was quiet, cool and very pretty.  Almost no traffic disturbed my peace of mind along the narrow road.  At the top, a green jumble of hills tumbled down to a reservoir before tumbling down to the busy tourist town of Beaufort.

Second pass of the day!

From the lake onward, traffic picked in a harsh crescendo that lasted for the next pass and a half.  The climb up the Col des Saisies was unpleasant:  hot and wall-to-wall traffic up to a typical pre-fab concrete ski resort.  I was glad to head down to Flumet, cross the Albertville highway and start climbing up to the Col des Aravis.

Third pass; starting to feel and look tired!

The climb up was pleasant, but my legs were starting to complain.  I had seen the other side of the pass last fall, but the climb was through new territory.

The fourth pass of the day:  a pass too far!

I raced down to Le Grand Bornand, passing graffiti from this year's Tour de France, and then started a rather weary ascent of the Col de la Colombiere, again familiar territory from a trip last fall.  The downhill to Cluses left me more than ready for the end of the day; it was after 6 pm and all I wanted was a meal and a bed.  Instead I had to traverse the rather bleak post-industrial wasteland of Cluses and make a final 300-metre climb over a ridge to gain entry to the Samoens valley.  I was bone-weary, but I managed to fly along the flat valley bottom at 29 km/h and climb up to my hotel, the slightly pretentious Edelweiss.  I wandered down to have dinner only to be told that the restaurant was full and I would have to find dinner elsewhere.  It was a long, tired walk back to the hotel after a huge steak frites dinner.

Day 8:  August 15th, Samoens-Col de Joux Plane (1700 m)-Col de Joux Verte (1760 m)-Pas de Morgins (1369 m)-Leysin (1300 m)

Distance:                                 93.0 km

Total to Date:                       1034.3 km

Final Altitude:                            1280 m

Vertical Metres Climbed:             2848 m

Time:                                            5:53

Average Speed:                      16.0 km/h

Maximum Speed:                    65.3 km/h

One of my favourite passes!

This final day of the trip was a lot of fun, even if I again was starting to feel the effects of four straight days of big climbs.  The Col de Joux Plane was almost traffic-free, steep and pretty.  I managed to make it to the top, a 950-metre climb, in just over an hour of steep climbing (the average grade is 9.5%, making it the steepest pass of the trip).

The Mont Blanc looming large above the Col de Joux Plane

I rolled down into Morzine, a downhill mountain-biking mecca, then turned uphill again and climbed another 900 metres to the Col de Joux Verte, just outside Avoriaz.  From there I descended to the lift station of Les Lindarets and used the ski lifts to get up into the Chatel ski area.  A slightly dodgy walk down along a steep scree slope finally led to pavement and a descent into Chatel.  I turned uphill for 3 easy kilometres to the Pas de Morgins and descended into Switzerland.  In the town of Morgins, I met up with my friend Avery and rode with him back home, first downhill to the Rhone Valley, then uphill to Leysin, my home base.  Despite having lived here for three years, I had never done the complete climb from Aigle before, put off by the heavy traffic.  I climbed up fairly slowly in the heat, and Avery left me behind.  I climbed the last section, from Sepey into Leysin, as slowly as I have ever done.  It was sort of sad that after so much cycling, I was so slow, but I think of the trip as training.  I would be faster afterwards, after my legs recovered, even if I was turtle-like that day.

Addendum:  Four more days in Guillestre!

No sooner was I back in Leysin than I was packing the car with two bicycles to drive right back south to Guillestre with Terri.  Terri had a week off between summer and fall terms and was keen to do some cycling, and Guillestre is perfectly located for that sort of thing.  I think that Bedoin, La Grave, Bourg St. Maurice, Barcelonnette and Guillestre are probably the five absolute epicentres of road cycling in the French mountains.  With the Vars, Agnel and Izoard right out of town, and more passes just a short distance south near Barcelonnette, Terri was excited with the possibilities.

Looking from the top down the last two kilometres of the Col de Izoard

We were in town for four days.  We started with the Izoard, and Terri really enjoyed it, although there was a lot more traffic than there had been a few days before.  I think the Izoard is a good test of climbing ability, with 30 kilometres and 1360 vertical metres, as well as lovely scenery and a great warmup ride through the gorges.  I rode faster than I had the first time (2:11 instead of 2:18, starting in Guillestre) and Terri had a great ride, really enjoying the scenery and the challenge.

Terri riding the dramatic Gorge de Guil on the way back from the Izoard

Terri chugging up the long slog up the Agnel

The second day was harder, as we rode the Col Agnel, the second-highest pass in France at 2744 metres.  It's a substantially longer ride (42 km) and gains more height (400 m more).  The Agnel leads to the Italian border, and gets quite a lot of motorcycle and bicycle traffic, making it slightly too busy for my taste.  It's a long approach along a valley that seems to climb fairly steadily the whole way until the final few switchbacks.  Both of us were feeling the effects of the Izoard in our legs, and weren't as quick or effortless as the day before.  I made it to the top in 3:05 and shivered at the top in the swirling mist, dodging the tangle of motorcycles, photo-happy tourists and cars infesting the summit.  Terri and I rode back, trying to escape the rain gathering atop the pass and feeling pretty tired.  We decided to have a lazy day the next day, and felt justified when it rained.

On the French-Italian border atop the Agnel (2744 m)

On the last day, we drove south to Barcelonnette and rode the Cayolle again.  This was my favourite big pass the previous week, and so I recommended it to Terri.  She absolutely loved it, and conditions could not have been better.  There was almost no traffic, not a cloud marred the sky and the scenery was even better the second time around, with the lower gorges and the larch forests of the upper stretches bathed in mid-day sunshine.  I got up the pass 13 minutes faster than the first time around (1:44 instead of 1:57) and Terri absolutely flew up the pass, feeling stronger and quicker than she had on previous climbs.  It was a great final day.

Triumphant atop the Cayolle

On the way home to Leysin on Wednesday (yesterday), we stopped the car at the Col de Lautaret and rode the last 8.5 km up to the Col de Galibier.  Terri hadn't ridden this last year on a weekend in La Grave, so it was unfinished business.  Starting from the Lautaret, the ride is easy, beautiful and spectacular.  Terri loved it and found it much less daunting than its reputation.  I made it up in 0:49, rather than the 0:57 it took me the week before (after doing the Izoard.)  I was pleased that I was faster on all three climbs that I repeated; maybe all that "training" on the Avignon-Leysin ride paid off.  Or maybe riding on fresher, better rested legs makes a big difference!

Terri riding the Galibier with the Meije looming behind

At any rate, it feels good to have done so much bike riding up so many great cols in such a concentrated period of time.  I feel fitter than I did before, and I would be curious to see if I've gotten faster on the local rides that I have been doing for the past 3 years.

(A few days later:  I did the climb that I have to do every time I ride back into Leysin, the Sepey-Leysin road, yesterday.  I had had two days off from cycling, I warmed up with a quick flattish ride to Diablerets, and I basically had ideal conditions.  I did in fact climb faster than ever before, 17:10.  My previous record of 17:25 was set last year when I was coming down from six weeks at high altitude, effectively blood-doping me.  My non-altitude record was 17:50, so it's a pretty reasonable improvement in climbing speed.  On the other hand, when the professional riders in the Tour de Romandie came up from Sepey in April, 2011, the winner made that same climb in a bit over 9 minutes, so there's an awfully long way to go to be genuinely fast!)

I'm not sure that I would want to do a bike trip in this style again; although the riding is great, I feel as though it sacrifices too much of the joy of sightseeing that I love in bicycle touring.  The days become just about riding and take away some of the serendipidity and spontaneity of rolling along seeing what's over the next hill.  Like Lance Armstrong said (correct in more ways than one), it's not about the bike.